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So yeah, there are a lot of videos from movie soundtracks starring actors from the movie, preferably in character. I have to say that the most memorable one from my childhood is one that's almost totally fallen off the cultural radar.

The year: 1983. The place: Jacksonville, Florida. Little Jamie Furdell had moved there during a cross country trip in his mom's Volkswagen Rabbit with no air conditioning. In the middle of summer. And along the way, I discovered how to fiddle with the radio and find the pop music stations.

Once we set up shop in Jacksonville I really dove into the world of pop music. I was all about American Top 40 and MTV, and I was especially all about... and this is embarassing... Olivia Newton-John. We had her greatest hits two-cassette tape (awesome) collection, and I was a big fan of the whole shebang. And thus, I was especially excited about a movie that came out in December 1983, starring ONJ (I call her ONJ) and John Travolta: Two of a Kind.

I distinctly recall dragging Mom to the AMC Regency Mall 6 theaters (since replaced by a larger multiplex) to see this, in retrospect, dreadfully awful movie. It was clearly an attempt to recapture the magic from previous ONJ-Travolta vehicle Grease, but wound being just an absolute mess of a love story. The main characters are revoltingly unlikeable: she's a bank teller, he's... um... an inventor. That's believable. He is struggling financially and decides to rob her bank; she replaces the loot with teller slips before handing it over and keeps the cash for herself, thus prompting Travolta to pursue her for the cash. Hijinks ensue.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them but knownst to us, a group of angels have wagered with God (voiced by, and I'm not making this up, an uncredited Gene Hackman) that they can get this pair together romantically, in an effort to... keep God from... ending the world? It sounds even stupider when I type it out like that. Basically they were trying to go for something Capra-esque, but it winds up making the exploits of these two dolts seem overly self-centered.

As a kid, I remember liking the fact that that the crew of angels had the power to freeze and rewind events in real time with a simple voice command. After rewatching this as an adult, I realize that the entirety of the film is a difficult experience to sit through and I must therefore take this moment to apologize profusely to Mom. Sorry, Mom. If you're still curious, here's a hilarious clip in which Travolta puts on his hero face and ONJ plays the victim.

The film was, super-sadly, not a hit, despite an all-star cast including Scatman Crothers, who at this point was being typecast as a magical black guy with a cool voice. And it was also the death knell for Travolta's film career... well, the first death knell, until its resurrection in Pulp Fiction and subsequent deathier knell Battlefield Earth.

But the soundtrack was actually a partial saving grace, and before the film came out, I'm pretty sure I succumbed to the hype of ONJ dancing around in her top single from the album, "Twist of Fate", on MTV. I still actually quite like this song, and I rediscovered it listening to an episode of American Top 40 from my collection.

Basically, ONJ, backlit and with super-high '80s hair, is defending her crush on Travolta, in a dark neon-lit courtroom suspended over some kind of body of water, while clips from the movie, including their plainly uncomfortable love scene, are presented as evidence. Then, the coup de grace at the end: John Travolta is there! Except that, hilariously, his scenes appear to have been filmed not at the same time as ONJ's, possibly in an entirely different country. They pretend to look directly at each other longingly, and fade to black.

That's the stuff right there.

All right, first of all sorry I've been not so much with the blogging. But there's at least two other Furdells who could be taking up my slack. So, I'm just saying, I'm not the only jerk.

OK, here's another one of those ridiculous lists you can help me with. I've decided that the best music videos of all fit the following criteria:

1. The song is from a movie soundtrack; and


2. one or more actors from the movie appear in the video. Preferably in character.

I don't mean like they used footage from the film, I mean the actor or actors actually had to shoot special footage for the music video. And it doesn't count if the actor is the musician (like if Will Smith does a song for his own movie, for example).

Here are the ones I've come up with. Starting with the most obvious, "Gangsta's Paradise" by Coolio from the god-awful Dangerous Minds, prominently featuring Michelle Pfeiffer, in a speaking role no less.

Maybe it's because that video's from the mid-90s, but I generally expect the actor(s) not to show up until the very end of the video, after we've seen a lot of scenes from the movie. I don't recommend that you skip to the end of John Parr's "Man In Motion" -- if you do, you won't get to see the scenes from St. Elmo's Fire, which are hilarious. A character in this movie tries to kill herself by sitting in front of an open window, and this is seen by her friends as a credible suicide attempt. But if you just want to see John Parr interact with the cast of the film, you can fast forward to the last minute.

That's like Julia's favorite movie, by the way. Moving on, here's the music video that I would say is both the cheesiest ever, and the best ever: "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" by Starship, from the motion picture Mannequin. The real stars here are the lead singers, who ham it up in an un-self-conscious way that nobody can in a post-9/11 world. There's a brief cameo in the end by your favorite Mannequin character, Hollywood Montrose.

Here's one I was fond of as a kid: "When the Going Gets Tough the Tough Get Going" by Billy Ocean, from Jewel of the Nile. Michael Douglas, the super-sexy Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito just look like they're having so much fun as Billy Ocean's backup singers.

YouTube is having a two-for-one special on themes from movies about bustin' ghosts. These are interesting, because they also include a ton of cameos by celebrities who weren't even in the movie. The first one, "Ghostbusters" by Ray Parker, Jr. from the eponymous film, has about a dozen unrelated actors who help out with the chorus (Chevy Chase, John Candy, Teri Garr, Carly Simon, Jeffrey Tambor, and even maybe-senator Al Franken, to name a few), and all four Ghostbusters show up in the end. The second song is the completely hilarious "On Our Own" by godfather of soul Bobby Brown, from the terrible Ghostbusters II. It squeaks in a Rick Moranis cameo early, and then manages to include Donald Trump, Iman, Christopher Reeve on a bicycle, Jane Curtin for some reason, and the chick from The Man With One Red Shoe, among others.

I'm so glad I get to include the bizarre 2-part epic that is "Goonies 'R' Good Enough" by Cyndi Lauper. The plot is so complicated that it requires narration and frequent subtitles. When Cyndi and the Goonies get kidnapped by pirates, Cyndi breaks the fourth wall and asks Goonies writer/executive producer Steven Spielberg for a tip on what to do. (He has no ideas.) And, André the Giant shows up for some reason.

I admit it: we're now at the point where I can't think of any more off the top of my head, so I'm having to guess. I'm batting 1000 so far though. Here's El DeBarge's "Who's Johnny" from Short Circuit. Yep, sure enough this one has appearances by both Ally Sheedy, and a cardboard standup of Steve Guttenberg, who I guess was busy with Police Academy 4: Citizens On Patrol that day. El takes the witness stand in a trial against Ally and Cardboard Steve, but the bad news is that footage from the film is admissible as evidence. Luckily everyone in the courtroom is in love with Ally Sheedy.

OK, I specifically said it doesn't count if Will Smith does the song for his own movie. But I'd be remiss if I excluded James's favorite song, "Wild Wild West", from James's favorite movie. It prominently features Salma Hayek (worth, as always, triple the price of admission) and, in a casting move only slightly less distracting than Cardboard Steve Guttenberg, we have someone who is clearly not Kenneth Branagh playing the back of Kenneth Branagh's head.

So those are the ones I can think of. But I feel like there's another lurking on the edges of my brain. Help me out by naming some more music videos in the comment section...won't you?

This is going to be a slightly different edition of FCCT, with a modified format. The film in question is a very well-made, straight-up modern horror film, and almost anyone who's ever seen a scary movie knows what's going to happen -- some people are going to go someplace they shouldn't, and those people are going to die horribly. Since this movie is all about the voyage rather than the destination, I'm going to eschew the usual plot synopsis and character descriptions.

The Film: La Noche del terror ciego (1971), literally The Night of the Blind Terror -- but in America we call it Tombs of the Blind Dead.

Planet of the Apes connection: Apparently because some of the baddies' beards make them look moderately simian, and because of the timeless popularity of movies about intelligent apes, American drive-in distributers changed the title to Revenge from Planet Ape and added a poorly-narrated prologue explaining that humans destroyed ape civilization centuries ago, and that the apes vowed to one day rise again. (Bonus promotional tidbit: some theaters required both a ticket and a free, Blind Dead-branded barf bag for entrance. Adorable.)

Background: Tombs is the first of a series of four films by Spanish writer/director Amando de Ossorio. I stumbled upon it recently, while thumbing through Jamie Russell's very informative Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, and as a fairly knowledgeable fan of living dead movies I was surprised to find a cult-favorite series I'd never heard of. Even more shocking, this first installment at least is very, very good. (I haven't gotten around to the other three yet, but I'll see them soon -- I got the DVD collection, which comes in its own coffin.)

Back after a brief hiatus, it's Furdell Classic Cinema Theatre. Unfortunately, due to the collapse of the economy, FCCT's budget has been cut in twain! But we shall soldier on.

The Film: Zapped Again! (1990)

That's right, the sequel to: This movie.

Other sequels that were better than the original: The Godfather Part II, Rocky III, Teen Wolf Too, Still Casablanca-ing

French title: Encore, nous avons été zapped

Contribution to popular culture: This film may not have invented the self-congratulatory fist-pump, but by gosh it perfected the technique.

Apparently upon hearing that the original was recently cited on this very blog, David Lynch is producing Alex Cox's Repo Chick, which begins production in January.

Cox has previously said that the follow-up will “unfold against the background of the credit crunch and the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, where repossessions of homes, cars and other forms of property is at a new high. ‘The repo business has expanded to everything from boats, houses, aeroplanes, small nations…children”.

The Film: Blood Diner (1987)

Spiritual remake of: Blood Feast (1963), a probable future Furdell Classic Cinema Theatre movie that a character in John Waters's Serial Mom called "the Citizen Kane of gore movies."

But it reminded us of: Repo Man (1984), which has an eerily similar grainy punk-rock aesthetic and comic surrealist streak. I thought this was a strange connection for my brain to make, since there's no cannibalism in Repo Man, but James came to the same conclusion independently, so there must be something to it.

Premise: When not feeding people to vegetarians at their diner, two brothers, at the behest of their dead uncle's talking brain, devote their lives to resurrecting the ancient goddess Sheetar, via a ritual that hasn't been performed -- as we're told many times -- in over five million years.

The Film: Zapped! (1982)

Punctuation in the title? And how!

They were going for: What if Carrie was a dude, and she went to Ridgemont High?

They ended up with: What if someone with amazing powers fell in love with a sociopath?

What did the pitch meeting look like?

The Film: Stewardess School (1986)

Genre: Bawdy sex comedy, unless that's redundant

Can the entire film be reduced to one animated gif?:

Who are we ripping off?: It's just a more sexist Police Academy, which released its third entry ("Back In Training") a few months before Stewardess School came out.

Made-Up Slang: Stewardesses often refer to themselves as "stews" and to the title institution as "Stew School," much like how newsies talk about selling "papes."

Opening today in theaters near you: Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which is both a long-awaited sequel to Beverly Hilla Ninja and a long-awaited adaptation of a series of Taco Bell commercials.

Actual conversation I had at work, when a preview aired:

ME: Oh, look, it's a movie based on those Taco Bell ads.

HIM: I loved those ads! I hope the movie version doesn't ruin it.

People in the early 20th century had little sense of the historical value of their pop culture; and, celluloid is hilariously flammable. So it's unusual to get good news about old film reels (just ask Universal Studios).

Amazingly, a full theatrical version of Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis -- the version thought lost forever -- has turned up in Argentina.

To give you some background: this original theatrical version, which runs about 210 minutes, was only seen in a handful of theaters in Germany in 1927 before it was chopped down to a 90 minute running time for widespread distribution. As you might imagine, certain story elements got pretty severely lost in the process. About six years ago the F.W. Murnau Foundation released a digitally-restored version that clocked in at around two hours and described some of the "lost forever" footage via new title cards -- that's the only version I've seen.

Now if they can only find the director's cut of The Magnificent Ambersons...

In a bit of sad news for James Bond enthusiasts like myself, Amy Winehouse will not be doing the next Bond theme after all, apparently because she's a total mess.

Very disappointing. Whose style is more well-suited to Bond than Winehouse, a sexy young Brit who drinks way, way too much and produces hit songs about same? Well, besides 50 Cent?

Pulp Fiction and William Shakespeare are two great tastes that taste great together.

Vincent: And know'st thou what the French name cottage pie?
Julius: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
Vincent: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
Julius: What say they then, pray?
Vincent: Hachis Parmentier.
Julius: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
Vincent: Cream is but cream, only they say la crème.
Julius: What do they name black pudding?
Vincent: I know not;
I visited no inn where't could be bought.

This fills me with glee. The wiki page for this project is here.

I do not see movies in the theater these days. We saw a few in the summer when Alex was small enough to sleep through a movie in the cry room, but that era ended before the Oscar contenders came out. So, for the first time I think ever, I did not see any of the movies that were up for awards this year, unless you count Ratatouille (please do) or Transformers (definitely don't). But, my ignorance will not keep me from putting in my two cents about the winners!

Best Actress
As soon as I saw the clips of La Vie en Rose I knew Cotillard would win. She is very very pretty, and in at least part of the film she looked very very ugly. The Academy loves that shit, especially for women. (Don't worry, I'll spare you the feminist rant.) Charlize Theron becomes marginally less skeletal, Oscar! Nicole Kidman dons an enormous nose and frizzy hair, Oscar! The ugly and unadorned must seem like another species to the thin and beautiful ladies of Hollywood. They really have to dig deep to portray ugly realistically, and shall be awarded accordingly! In short, women playing ugly = men playing retarded in terms of Oscar accolades.

Best Actor
I don't want to see Lewis screaming about abandoning his boy ever again. I mean it. Just judging by that clip and the milkshake clip, there was a hell of a lot of scenery chewing going on. Besides, it's about time Johnny Depp got an Oscar, as thanks for gracing us with his extreme hotness.

Best Original Screenplay
I have no doubt that Juno is a good, fun movie. Everyone seems to enjoy it, though I have heard a few people say it is overwritten, whatever that means. But, I have strong suspicions that Cody won because people were enamored with the whole former-stripper-makes-good thing.

Best Supporting Actress
I cannot argue with this. Tilda Swinton is a great actress, in that she continually manages to portray sane people when in real life she seems to have a touch of the crazies. I jest, she really is awesome. She's versatile, she's up for anything, and she rocked the American accent.

Best Picture
I am just glad Atonement didn't win. Even the trailers for this film seemed to shout, "GIVE ME AN OSCAR!"

Finally, I heart Jon Stewart. I thought he was funny, despite what those malcontents at TWoP had to say. Maybe they were hoping he would do some musical numbers?

In spite of Jon Favreau, this looks promising. Though the musical choice is a bit conspicuous.

Julia and I just got back from The Simpsons Movie, which was fronted by a trailer for Daddy Day Camp, the sequel to Daddy Day Care, in which Eddie Murphy inexplicably starts a day care center in spite of being actionably inept.

This trailer is remarkable. Here are some highlights...

1. Eddie Murphy has been replaced by Cuba Gooding, Jr. Think about that. Eddie Murphy, the man currently best known for his multiple roles in the career-defining Norbit -- a film so bad, you can rent it from the McDonalds "Red Box" service -- was not willing to appear in this sequel. For his stand in they had to get Norbit co-star and Oscar^tm winner Cuba Gooding, Jr. (Best Actor, Radio¹)
2. In fact, this film is so un-promising that absolutely nobody from the original wanted to be involved, as evidenced by the ominous phrase, "From the studio that brought you Daddy Day Care." Really. You thought it was overboard when they started marketing films as being "from the producer of" other films. Well, they've taken it a step further. My question: Why not say it's from the studio that brought you Spider-Man 2?
3. One of the best trailer lines, possibly ever...Cuba's skeptical wife, upon hearing his premise-inducing plan to take Daddy Day Care to its next logical step, points out: "But you hate the outdoors!" Sounds like a recipe for ZANY!!!

Will DDC2 be the next Snow Dogs? Or will it turn out to be another Boat Trip?² Keep your browser tuned to Furdell Dot Com -- your headquarters for all things Daddy Day Camp-related -- for round-the-clock coverage. You know, you should really set our site as your browser's home page.

¹ I assume.
² I think that how you interpret the last two sentences says a lot about you as a person.

The title of this post comes from one of the faux trailers in Grindhouse, which was indeed the delightfully sleazy orgy of violence I was hoping it would be. The Tarantino half really drags (I saw one review describe it as a car chase merged with a women's acting workshop, which is accurate), but he makes up for it by the end. I saw it at Cinerama, which is perhaps too nice a theater to be seeing it at... not a grindhouse at all.

If you need to get in the mood to see this, fortunately there's no shortage of real grindhouse trailers on the YouTubes.

Early frontrunner Joysticks (1983) is now at position 304 on my queue, thanks mostly to the giggle-inducing naughty title. It had some hurdles to overcome, such as the fullscreen presentation (come on, makers of terrible movies on DVD -- some of us are connaisseurs, you know). But in the end, its 83-minute run time won my heart Congratulations, Robert.

So why is "Paint Your Wagon" at 305 on my queue? Because I'll watch any movie that meets my low, low standard for culturally relevance.

I'm out sick from work. Usually I'd work through it, but unfortunately the nature of my illness involves me having no voice, which makes directing quite difficult. In fact I'm now only able to communicate via blogging. (Although I've managed to communicate with Julia very effectively by just whistling in the same tonality as how I would've spoken something. It's quite a trick, actually.)

Well, it's that time again: time to let one lucky individual put a movie on my Netflix queue. Our last winner, Susana, chose to make me watch Newsies, a 1992 Disney musical about boys who wear vests. Not cool, Susana.

As I recall, Susana unironically liked this film. However, she was probably twelve when she saw it. It's written, directed, and staged like musical theater, instead of like a musical movie; and, considering Christian Bale is the star, he's shockingly unable to dance or sing. Also apparently someone told the screenwriters late in the game that there needed to be a romantic subplot in there, because they phoned that in big-time. This movie also stars Doogie Howser's friend and Ann-Margaret. The biggest disappointment: apparently Robert Duvall had a stroke that only affected the acting part of his brain. Because, oh man, he sucked.

So, here's how it works: anyone not directly related to me can suggest a movie. It can be completely terrible, or you can go the Susana route and pick a movie that only you could possibly like. It has to be available on Netflix, and it has to be a movie I've never seen. (Sorry, Batman & Robin.) Put it in a "comment" to this here blog entry. I'll pick the winner arbitrarily, and it will go on the very bottom of my Netflix queue. I'll see it in a little over 2 years.

I give you Sleepless in Seattle, recut as... a horror movie.

(It's like that Shining-recut-as-a-family-comedy trailer, but in reverse.)

If Stallone wants me to see Rocky Balboa, he should stop putting out trailers and start forcing me to watch Slate's video slideshow of Rocky montages.

Worst assertion: "1982's Rocky III marks the franchise's descent into extreme narrative laziness", apparently because much of the story is told through montage. What's narratively lazy about paring down a story to its bare essentials and telling it -- to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger", no less -- in under three minutes? That's the narrative equivalent of one-armed pushups at the crack of dawn.

Runner-up: "This [the first montage in Rocky III] is the first indication of the Rocky series' penchant for reverse snobbery. An open display of wealth?appearing in an American Express ad, say?always portends doom. Contrarily, signs of poverty?like shadowboxing on the open road?reveal a steely resolve." I would argue that the first indication was in Rocky, wherein Rocky wore sweats and trained a lot while Apollo Creed just walked around in a suit making ridiculous statements.

Much better assertion: "Sergei Eisenstein might have invented the montage, but this four-minute scene [oddly enough, the training montage from Rocky IV] proves that Sylvester Stallone perfected it." Clearly true.

R.I.P. Basil Poledouris.

Last night I stayed up late watching one of my favorite 80s coming-of-age sex romps, Fraternity Vacation. Yes, it only gets 3.2 out of ten stars from IMDB users, but what do they know? It's the only movie of its kind in which every single character, including the villainous rival fraternity brothers, their topless girlfriends, and Amanda Bearse, turns out to be really likeable in the end. And when the nerd loses his virginity to the unattainable girl that the two fraternities were making bets on, everyone seems genuinely happy to have learned a valuable lesson, and Tim Robbins crushes a beer can on his forehead. Seriously, this must be the most feel-good movie ever.

For whatever reason, watching this movie so late caused me to dream that I had written and directed a very faithful remake of FV contemporary Stewardess School (3.1 on the IMDB scale -- yeah, that's probably about right). Only in my version, when the two "male stewardess" main characters realize they're totally about to get laid after all, their mutual celebration devolves -- literally -- as they start to act like chimpanzees, complete with hopping and screeching. In the last shot, one of them throws his poop at the other. The movie is a huge critical success, and I do a magazine interview in which I confront the fact that I'm now being called "The King of Horror," even though I didn't really mean for it to scare people.

Long-time Furdell.com fans will remember that I have only once broken the 3rd law of DVD purchasing, when I bought a set of Rocky DVDs before having viewed the universally-hated Rocky V.

Well, I've done it again, this time even more flagrantly, when I purchased...Gojira!!! (That's the only way to say the title of the movie. You have to scream it like a giant lizard's about to stomp you. GOJIRAAAAA!!!!!!)

Why? Well, for one thing, like Cop Land, I've been trying unsuccessfully to watch this film for years. Even when it was rereleased in theaters a few years back I totally missed out, which was extremely lame of me.

Also, this set includes the Americanized version, Godzilla, King of the (yawn) Monsters. (You have to yawn when you read the Americanized title, because it's totally boring compared to GojiiiiiiirrrrrAAAAAAA!!!!). As a study-er of film-related whatnot, I consider that "neat."

Will my horrible gamble pay off this time? Keep refreshing this site over and over and over to find out!

I love Iron Man. He's great. He was my favorite action figure as a child, and definitely played a major role in my later comic book obsession. Sure, nobody ever was able to write an interesting story about him until Kurt Busiek took over his comic in the late-90s. But still...I mean, just look at him! He's so cool! He has all these different armors! With ray beams.

Well, of course a movie has been announced. As to whether it actually gets made, my rule of thumb is "don't believe anything you hear about a comic book movie until you're actually allowed to purchase a ticket." But, in the interest of joining the collective moan of the comic book nerd community, "Waaaaugh, why is Jon Favreau directing." The fact that he was in Swingers can no longer make up for the fact that he directed Made, Elf, and Zathura: Jumanji In Space. And no, I don't care that you liked Elf.

Apparently they've cast Robert Downey, Jr. as Iron Man. That might be overkill...Iron Man is only an alcoholic. (Here's the runner-up link.) I like that casting, but how about a less family-friendly director? Perhaps it's time to tap Paul Verhoeven's valuable experience?

In other news, this weekend's season premiere of Saturday Night Live was hosted by Dane Cook; the next day, TiVo chose to record Simon Sez, in which Dane Cook plays the "comedic" sidekick. This is one of maybe three movies (including Wes Craven's Wishmaster and one other movie that I've blotted out of my memory) that was so bad I never made it all the way through. Why did TiVo do this, you ask? Because someone gave it three thumbs up without my consent.

James Furdell...revenge shall be mine.

I just saw Little Caesar, a 1931 gangster picture starring Edward G. Robinson, see? The movie was good, but the DVD had a really fun feature. I know I'm probably the last DVD fan to discover this.

It's "Warner Night at the Movies," with an optional and pointless introduction from the late Gene Siskel. (He's the dead one, right? Probably.) Anyway, this feature plays the movie after a preview, a newsreel, one or two shorts, and a cartoon. The full old-timey experience. It's a lot of fun...especially projected...

We've found it at last: the holy grail of movies. Austin Powers in Goldmember.

Whoa there, friend. I'm not saying that Goldmember is anything more than the worst movie I've seen in recent memory. Because it is, in fact, the worst movie I've seen in recent memory.

But it does have a Smashmouth song on the soundtrack...

...and it does, indeed, feature "the robot."

Long time Furdell.com readers know that, by scrolling down the page and looking to the left, you can find two movie lists. The first lists movies, always comedies and often starring Adam Sandler, in which a character does the robot -- that breakdancing technique that is the Hollywood equivalent of laff trak, because it tells you when to laugh without actually being funny.

The second list attempts to document the millions of films for which approximately $2.50 was shelled out to secure the rights to any given song by Smashmouth, especially "All Star."

We have tirelessly pursued that holy grail of movies that has a Smashmouth song AND robot dancing...until today. And thank god somebody else made it so we don't have to.

I'm going to assume that it took us four years to discover that Goldmember had robot dancing only because nobody watched Goldmember, until last night when I took one for the team. But I know there are more robot dance movies out there. Stay alert, faithful reader.

To find the robot scene in Goldmember, just go to the part right before the most racist scene.

As a sequel to 10 Things I Hate About Commandments, here's a link Andrew passed along to another faux trailer. This one makes The Shining look like a family comedy.

Was an Australian underwear model the best Bond ever? No, in fact, he was the worst. He had all the talent and charisma of a plank of wood with a leering happy face painted on it.

The article wastes several paragraphs arguing that On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Lazenby's only Bond movie, was good and was true to the book. True and true, but I'd say the film was good in spite of a lead who can't act. Also the article implies that Connery crawled back to the series after his career failed to take off, which goes counter to the more popular idea that the Broccoli family went crawling to Connery with a huge salary offer when they realized Lazenby couldn't act to save his life.

More mistifying to me is the author's disregard of other Bond actors for conflicting reasons. Roger Moore is "vapid" and Pierce Brosnan a "lightweight" compared to Connery and Lazenby (yeah, George Lazenby was just the picture of masculinity, right). But Timothy Dalton, the darkest, most violent, closest-to-the-source-material Bond, not to mention a man who can actually act, is "rightly forgotten." Unlike Lazenby, who's some kind of lost cinematic treasure. Huh.

Ah, but I see the author of the article is from Texas. That explains it. As we all know, all Texans are ignorant 100% of the time. Why don't we just let them secede already? WHY?

RUNNER UP:

But now, Arnold IS a politician! Get it? Maybe? Well, here's a better one: the number one most ironic line from Last Action Hero...

Sounds like a reference to Grass, right? But we all know Arnold hates early 20th century American poetry! Get it? Don't you get it?

That's right, I'm just catching up on the movies you all saw in 1993.

Other thoughts not worthy of an entire blog entry:

• If Death from The Seventh Seal walked off a movie screen (because for some reason it's showing in Los Angeles), wouldn't he speak Swedish?


• This movie would have been much better with a less annoying child star. Arnold's character is surprisingly complex.


• The main bad guy should have actually been played by Ron Silver, and not by his body double.


• It seems the bad guy's butler, who I thought was played by Oddjob from Goldfinger, was in fact played by Subzero from The Running Man, which is somehow even more awesome.

From now on, this will just be my DVD blog. Not really.

Anyway, you'll all be sad to know that Wedding Crashers narrowly escaped the Robot Movies list. Apparently the auteurs found out about our list, and the movie's Robot scene ended up on the cutting room floor. It's the scene where Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson karaoke "99 Red Balloons." Yeah, that's right, karaoke is a verb now.

Come to think of it, that scene is one of the wisest cuts ever. Everything about it just screams comedy clich?. Throw Ben Stiller in there, and suddenly I can't distinguish this from any other Hollywood comedy.

Actually Wedding Crashers was a lot better than I expected. I usually hate Vince Vaughn, for example, but he spends a lot of time in this movie getting hit by things, so that worked out.

But what's even better than the movie, is the "Uncorked" DVD. Pretty much every recent comedy gets the same DVD treatment: a theatrical cut version totally free of special features, and a feature-packed "unrated" edition. "Unrated" is supposed to make you think "more titties," but it turns out all it means is "this cut was never up for review by the MPAA, because we edited out scenes that made the movie worse than it already is."

(DVDs that represent the film as it would have been if the artists involved didn't have to water down the sex and violence for a preferred MPAA rating -- like Robocop and Basic Instinct -- do exist, but they're few and far between.)

Nitpicky? Maybe. But I've been angry for years that I can only watch the "expanded", or "lame" version of Superman: The Movie.

So why is the Uncorked Edition of Wedding Crashers so great? Because it gives you the option! You can go either "uncorked" or "theatrical." Being a purist, and Wedding Crashers being as it is our generation's Touch of Evil*, I went "theatrical." I haven't yet personally come across any other DVD that gives this option.

*Citizen Kane was too obvious.

...so we can see his movies the way they were originally intended to be seen.

Pardon my bitterness. I just watched Georgie's first feature-length film, THX 1138, courtesy Netflix. Unfortunately only the...ugh..."director's cut" is available on DVD, and in true Lucas fashion, it adds all kinds of anachronistic CGI.

I don't mean it looks anachronistic for the futuristic setting of THX 1138, but rather it just looks wrong for a movie released in 1971. The unexplained creatures who attack THX in the end look, well, like bad CGI -- like the troll in the first Harry Potter movie, for example. Kinda cartoony and not real. So, why do that? Why add something to a movie that people respect just fine already?

There's also some explosions, and some more subtle effects, but they still take you out of the story and make you think "How'd he do that thirty years ago?" Turns out he didn't. Bah!

So I was watching Buffy Season 6 (yes, I got the "Chosen Collection," because I am a nerd). For the uninitiated, that's the season where former magic junkie and Buffy best friend Willow witnesses the accidental murder of her longtime girlfriend Tara, and as a result Willow goes to the extremely dark side and tries to destroy Earth.

Like so many things, it reminds me of Superman: The Movie (note: if you don't put in that last part of the title, you must be talking about something else!). Specifically, it reminds me of the last act, in which Lois Lane dies as an indirect result of Lex Luthor's completely brilliant scheme. Superman looks up at the sky, does a spine-chilling rage scream, and then totally defies his father's decree to never interfere with human history.

It's the same camera angles and everything. Slip in a "Osiris, obey my will!" and black out Superman's eyes and you're watching Buffy.

So here's what I'm thinking: Because Tara died in a mundane way (she was shot), Willow was powerless to resurrect her, and that's why she ended up going apeshit. So, if Superman didn't have the power to completely shatter all science, what would he have done for vengeance? I like to think he would have thrown the Earth into the Sun. That would've been cool.

It just goes to show you: absolute power corrupts, but slightly less than absolute power means we're all doomed as soon as something bad happens to your girlfriend.

So I haven't seen 50 Cent's semi-biopic Get Rich or Die Tryin', but I understand he has some kind of problem expressing emotions, or "acting." It got me thinking: what would I do if a team of high-powered movie producers came up to me and said, "Andrew, you're contractually obligated to make a movie with 50 Cent. Get on that."

Since this fantasy is already improbable, I'd say: "Why, I'll just cast him in my next project, Bond 32: A Batman to Kill For." (Yes, in my fantasy land I'm hired to make a crossover film that breaks the trillon dollar box office mark.) 50 Cent can play the silent henchman, so the only emotion he has to convey is "badass."

He'll need a gimmick, of course. How about: getting shot doesn't kill him! It's just like real life, but in the movie we'll make it look sexy. Too out there, you say? Look, Jaws fell out of a plane without a parachute and looked fine a few scenes later. Bond dropped a frikkin' building on him and he just brushed his coat off. I think we can hit fiddy with a few shells and have him not walk with a limp, aight?

(Did I tell my Richard Kiel story already? Oh, I totally did. Never mind then.)

And best of all, we can have him do the theme song on the cheap, in the grand tradition of...oh...I'm going to go with Get Over It.

"Stop, Andrew!" you cry. "Bond and gangsta rap are two great tastes that just don't make sense together! A gangsta Bond theme would be lame." That's where you're wrong, friend.

First of all, I'd like to point out that Bond themes change with the times. Bond had a disco period, and 80s pop period, and recently a techno period. These days it's all about the rap.

Secondly, thematically, Bond and gangsta rap have everything in common! "Oh no I di'n't"? Oh yes I did, reader. Play this game when you're bored: How many aspects of gangsta rap can you name that are 100% interchangeable with James Bond?

• Excessive drinking, often of champagne
• Conspicuous consumption
• Killing people, and being okay with that
• Sexual promsicuity, especially with improbably-named women

50 Cent's "If I Can't" from his debut album (chorus: "If I can't do it homey, it can't be done") is essentially Carly Simon's "Nobody Does It Better", with more F-bombs. Since most of his songs are about how awesome he is, you can just replace the name "50 Cent" with "James Bond" and get something pretty good. Consider Snoop Dogg's interlude in "P-I-M-P":

J-A-M-E-S B-O-N-D and S-N-double-O-P!

Hell, if 50 does a song about casino gambling and extreme winter sports, I'll have to upgrade him from henchman to James Bond himself. (Or Batman.)

"Fine, Andrew,' you concede graciously, "gangsta rap and James Bond have a lot in common. But Bond's still too snooty to listen to rap." Well then, dear reader, allow me to direct your attention to Xzibit A, a bit of forgotten dialogue from Goldfinger:

BOND
(at his most pretentious ever)
My dear girl, there are some thingsh that jusht aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38 degreesh Fahrenheit. That'sh jusht as bad as lishtening to the Beatlesh without earmuffsh! I prefer the Monkees.

ODDJOB
(sneakily)
::hits Bond in the back of the head::

(He didn't really say he prefers the Monkees.) But less than nine years later, best Beatle Paul McCartney did one of the most awesome Bond themes of all time.

Oops, gotta go switch the morning news. In closing, you know I'm right.

Have we decided what to call this decade yet? I'm leaning towards "Oh-sie oh's," but that's just me.

At any rate, Andrew's probably more of an expert on this subject than I, but... zombies. Lots of 'em. This has been the decade for great zombie movies. 28 Days Later, the new Dawn of the Dead, and of course Shawn of the Dead, are all instant horror classics.

Hmm... it's almost as if somebody's trying to say something about our current culture... but I don't know what. What could it possibly be? I just don't know. Surely there's some kind of subtext... is there anything violent we've committed ourselves to doing with a zombie-like fervor? I can't remember.

Well, Joe Dante decided to come right out and say it, with his one-hour segment on the Masters of Horror series on Showtime. Liberal politics plus zombies... come to think of it, this alone could get Andrew to subscribe to Showtime. (Or at least write down a reminder in his Night Stalker swag notebook to rent the DVD, whenever it comes out.)

Once again, I'm very disappointed in you.

This time, you failed to report that the Adam Sandler remake The Longest Yard should be added to the Robot List, which has been lagging far behind the easier-to-update Smashmouth list.

Whats worse, TLY is a rare "triple robot." It contains the following:

1.) A scene in which a character does the "robot dance" for comedic effect;
2.) A later scene, referencing the first, in which a large group does the same dance; and
3.) Scenes from the 1986 favorite Short Circuit.

Other interesting tidbits about this film:

• The only prison movie I can think of in which all the homosexual sex is entirely consentual.
• Killing off the comic relief early is a bad move in a comedy.
• There's this scene where Adam Sandler is going to recruit a prisoner to a football team, and I swear this prisoner is in Hannibal Lector's cell. That would definitely have made this movie, if it was Hannibal in there. "Yes, Adam Sandler. I'll play on your football team but you must do something for me in return. Tsssssst tsst tsst." (It's funnier when you actually hear me do the voice.)
• Another guy he gets for the team is obviously Green Mile. Not the actor, mind you...just the character. But without healing powers, I guess.
• Yet again we learn that no Adam Sandler movie is complete without a cameo from Rob Schneider.

This is, by the way, Adam Sandler's third robot movie, according to the official Furdell.com tally. Thank you, Adam Sandler, for thinking the robot dance is still funny. It's right up there with "old people being cute" and "peeing on things" for you, isn't it. You complete scum.

Once a generation, a movie comes along with a title so awesome, you have no choice but to clear your calendar a year in advance in order to see it.

For our generation, I believe that movie would have to be... wait for it...

... waaaaait for it...

Snakes on a Plane.

Snakes. ON A PLANE.

Not sure what the plot is? Here's a hint: some snakes are loose on a plane. Hilarity ensues.

Wait, it gets better. The movie stars... Samuel L. Jackson. To the casting director, all I can say is, "good motherfuckin' choice!"

It's not often a movie becomes a cult classic a full year ahead of its release, but some people are already coming up with fan-made posters:

There are also ideas out there for possible sequels, all the way up through Snakes on a Plane 14: Snakes in Space.

So there you have it. Looking for the best movie title ever? I'll take Snakes on a Plane. For the win.

Dear James,

Or disagreements on the Cannonball Run franchise are well documented. Well, today I saw Cannonball Run II at long last, and I can say with great accuracy and certainty that you are completely wrong, in every way, about everything ever.

Yes, it's true -- I watched this movie sober, which is a mistake of high magnitude. And sure, I didn't have the benefit of Celebrity Movie-Watching Pal Matt Bernstein ("He'll make it funny -- guaranteed"), but I suspect neither did you when you first liveblogged this film. And yes, the fact that the DVD was pan-and-scan did hurt some of the more peripheral sight gags, but again, I believe your TiVo'd version, no doubt addled with commercial interruptions, was much the same. Therefore, more or less, I think we were watching the same movie.

So how could you say that this pale imitation is better than the original? The only conclusion I can reach is that you were adopted and that we are in fact not blood relatives.

Allow me to elaborate. First of all, the interplay between Burt and Dom is much less slappy in this sequel, and as a result, the outtakes suffer. That Merilu Henner is somehow attracted to Dom, and that aging Burt is attracted to aging Shirley MacLaine, is highly upsetting. Frank Sinatra's appearance is entirely Frank-indulgent and annoying. Richard Kiel proves once agani that he is much better in non-speaking roles.

(A note: I met Richard Kiel at a comic book convention. This is true. He was asking $10 for one glossy photo, or $20 for 3. I asked for one photo from The Spy Who Loved Me. Richard Kiel, who was huge and ugly as you'd expect but less intimidating because he didn't look like he could stand up on his own, said "You know, for $10 more, you can have three pictures." Less thinking than usual, I blurted out, "Sure, but what would I do with three pictures of Richard Kiel?" He didn't talk to me after that.)

Even the crazy proctologist from the first movie manages to not be funny in the sequel. Perhaps this movie's only saving grace is the return of Molly Picon as Mrs. Goldfarb -- a cameo that you must not have noticed, James, as you failed to mention it in your liveblog. Just further proof that you simply don't know what you're talking about!

The only genuine laugh I got out of this film, was that chimpanzee. Yes, dear reader, the chimp joke is played out -- I'm not one to laugh at just a chimp. But this chimp is accompanied by some hilarious music. "Doo Doo doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, CRASH! SPLAT!"

I give this film my lowest rating ever: twelve stars. Take that! James, I'm having your Film Studies degree from prestigious Emory University revoked. Remember: It's not what you do, it's how you do it. Cannonball.

Your brother?
Andrew

Here's the movie I made this summer. It's around 7 minutes and 17.5 MB -- thanks to RM for compressing and hosting it.

My thoughts: I needed more time to edit (especially where sound was concerned). I got some complaints that the score wasn't whimsical enough. My most consistent praise concerned casting, which, yes, I did, but I can't help but feel like that's just complimenting the actors. Ah well.

COMPUTO UPDATE: Some of you are aware that my computer, COMPUTO, recently suffered a cataclysmic crash and refused to start up (the words "Unexpected Kernel Mode Trap" are forever burned into my brain). After several days worth of failed attempts, I came to the conclusion that my problem was not hardware related, but could not be fixed via safe mode -- and so the hard drive had to be formatted, and the cycle started anew. My computer is now called "ASTATRON."

Interestingly, all kinds of stuff is working now that didn't before. My DVD-ROM drive works. It can actually read discs now, instead of just sitting there like before. And, the "New Hardware Found" wizard doesn't pop up every time I start up my machine. So it all worked out for the best.

This link courtesy RM. For all you Statler and Waldorf fans: it's them at the movies.

The Seattle Times has the story.

Reached at his home in Ashburn, Va., "Clonus" director Robert S. Fiveson said Wednesday that he'd sneaked into a preview screening of "The Island" the previous night. "I went in hoping and praying that it was enough different than 'Clonus' so that I could just put my mind at rest and move on, but I can't. Because astonishingly enough, it not only seems to rest on the very skeleton of the film, ... there were enough (similarities) in the movie in the first third that I thought this cannot be happenstance or casual."

Whoa, he lives in Ashburn. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go drive to his house and ask him what it was like to work with Darrin #2. (Kimberly's out of town... I need someone to annoy.)

My new laptop is the bickety-bomb. I'm typing this from a coffee shop, while sipping a latte. Wireless networking is one of the few things I adopted early that really caught on, and I'm glad, because it's the bestest invention ever. Take that, caveman who invented the wheel. Take that and like it.

Anyway, have you guys seen the ads for this new movie The Island? I've been boycotting Michael Bay movies ever since The Rock, which was so retarded it made me weep for poor Michael Biehn. And The Island was (and probably is) going to be no different. But the plot line caught my eye, because it seemed awfully familiar:

Lincoln Six-Echo (McGregor) is a resident of a seemingly utopian but contained facility in the mid 21st century. Like all of the inhabitants of this carefully controlled environment, Lincoln hopes to be chosen to go to the "The Island" - reportedly the last uncontaminated spot on the planet. But Lincoln soon discovers that everything about his existence is a lie. He and all of the other inhabitants of the facility are actually human clones whose only purpose is to provide "spare parts" for their original human counterparts. Realizing it is only a matter of time before he is "harvested," Lincoln makes a daring escape with a beautiful fellow resident named Jordan Two-Delta (Johansson). Relentlessly pursued by the forces of the sinister institute that once housed them, Lincoln and Jordan engage in a race for their lives to literally meet their makers.

The reason it seemed familiar was because I'd seen it before. And it had been called Parts: The Clonus Horror. And... it was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

MST3K, as you may know, has been highly influential in my life. Gleefully making fun of things using pop culture references is basically my whole bag, and it was MST that elevated that to an artform over 10 seasons. The Clonus episode was one of the more hilarious, considering the parade of D-List barely-ready-for-Match Game celebrities, like Digger Barnes from Dallas and the second, unfunnier Darren from Bewitched. And Peter Graves! And the plot went something like-a this:

A young man escapes from a govenment run project called Clonus only to find out that Peter Graves (Jeff Knight) a candidate for Presidency is a conspirator to keep Clonus a secret. Top government officials are aware of it and support the super secret project, because they are cloning themselves to live longer and better lives, at the expense of their clone counter-part, who is no more than a "slave" as far as human rights are concerned. The ethical and moral values are explored as the escapee (Tim Donnelly) known as Richard returns full circle back to Clonus, only to find his girlfriend lobotimized for government security purposes.

So, yeah: The Island is basically Clonus warmed over, but:

- Set in the future
- Plus a bunch of Michael Bay-esque car chases
- Minus the joy of seeing a parade of "Hey, it's that guy" quasi-stars

Blecch! Count me out. I prefer the original Clonus as seen on MST3K, which I just ordered on the Internet. In a perfectly legitimate and legal fashion.

Maybe not so legitimate was the way Dreamworks ripped off the idea. So sayeth Clonus director Robert Fiveson (whose name, as Mike noted in that particular MST3K episode, is Scandanavian for "Son of Five"):

The Island is not in any way sanctioned by me. In fact, Jeff Katzenberg saw [Clonus] in '78 as a possible pick up by Paramount, and commented at that time that if this was what I could do with a million, he would love to see what I could do with ten. The budget was $257,000---1/400th of The Island. I saw a trailer for it a couple of days ago and nearly soiled myself. There were so many similarities---not just in theme, but actual shots! I hope it does a lot of business; But more than anything else, I hope it gets publicly outed.

So there you go. For shame, Michael Bay; for shame. Um... again.

Don't put Blind Date on your resum?'s list of TV work. Elimidate is also not as impressive as you'd think.

That is all.

Hitch I could understand. That robot dance came at the very end, almost during the credits.

But how do you explain The Pacifier, which had not one, but two instances of Smashmouth music?

Of all our readers, at least a couple must have seen this Vin Deasel vehicle, if for no other reason, then because it had a Gilmore Girl in it. (Rorelai I think.)

So once again: if you see a movie with robot dancing used for comedic effect, or any Smashmouth song, leave the theater immediately and contact me. It is exactly that important. If we don't keep these lists up-to-date, we'll never be able to find that one elusive movie that has both robot dancing and Smashmouth music, or better yet, robot dancing to Smashmouth music. For only then can we at last rest.

Now using the "robot" breakdancing technique for the purpose of humor: Hitch, starring Will Smith.

...when they're quoting me.

"With God as my witness, I WILL DESTROY THE 2WENTY."

Arlington software engineer James Furdell, 29, posted those words last summer on his blog at Furdell.com. The object of his unbridled wrath: Regal's pioneering pre-show, "The 2wenty," which runs for 20 minutes before every movie on 5,300 screens nationwide.

"I really like watching movie trailers," Furdell said when reached by phone. "But those prepackaged commercials are just more offensive to me for some reason."

So far Furdell's threats remain unrealized, as evidenced by a recent screening of "The 2wenty" at the Regal Cinemas in Rockville.

Ahh, but little do they know that they're just playing into Phase I of my plan... Media Saturation.

Apparently they'll be releasing all the Thin Man sequels on DVD in August. And I've been TiVoIng them on Turner Classic Movies like some kind of peasant!

Slate has an article suggesting that Michael Jackson should have named his chimp "Asta" after the dog from The Thin Man, as I did my cat. They link to an Asta fan site. Apparently he was also in Bringing Up Baby...who knew.

Robert Duvall as "Buck" Weston in Kicking and Screaming: "You'll never beat your old man at anything!"

Oh, they didn't just slip a Great Santini reference into their Will Ferrell kids' movie. No, they went ahead and made it a major part of the plot.

1. I did not choose to watch Shark Tale.

   You have to understand that, back when I had two roommates, I was only able to get them to split my Netflix bill by alternating movie picks with them. Now I only live with Julia, my lovely girlfriend (hi Julia), but her picks leave something to be desired.

   Imagine following up The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly with White Chicks and it's like you live in our house.

2. Long time readers of Furdell.com are well aware that the lowest form of humor, right after "involves poop," is puns. That being the case, Shark Tale is a very, very, very bad film. The first five minutes packs in more puns than my high school english teacher managed in my entire junior year, and for those of you who didn't take English with me in 1997, that was a lot of puns. So many that I developed a Pun Defense System (PDS). It went a little something...like this.
   MS. LONG So you see class, it seems that Julius Caesar's friends were real brutes.

   ME
   Yes, good point. They were indeed loutish.

   Note that Katie Couric plays a character -- presumably based on herself -- named "Katie Current." Isn't that clever? Because current is a word you might associate with water! Which is like fish!

3. Did you know? Renee Zellweger put on three hundred million pounds to play the role of Angie, a fish.
   
4. If you thought Robert de Niro hit rock bottom in Meet the Fockers, you were way off. Oh for the halcyon days of Analyze That and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Wait, what?
5. After the longest 83 minutes of my life, the movie ends. Then comes the credits. Instead of outtakes, Shark Tale goes with a kind of system: wait five minutes; show a brief animation that wasn't worth waiting for; repeat.

   The worst example? Some kind of crab thing comes on the screen and, mockingly (I'm not imagining this), says "It's not even half-way done yet! HAW HAW HAW." This reminded me of the much-loved pod race scene from Star Wars Episode I: The Suckening, in which, after one excrutiatingly long lap of being forced to watch a little kid who can't act fly around in a circle, we are treated to Jar Jar Binks, who says, and these words are burned forever into my mind: "He has to do that two more times?"

   I don't know if I'm remembering things wrong, but I swear there was a crane shot when I stood up in the theater and yelled "NOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

6. Remember how I said Shark Tale was a Julia pick? Well, that's not to say she stays awake through the whole thing. She makes it about 30 minutes into any given movie. (Usually I look at her eyes every 5 minutes to determine exactly when she falls asleep. Today, I felt lazy and just mumbled "are you still awake?", which of course garnered no response.)

   Do to a personal rule, I am still forced to watch the entire movie from start to finish. (If you think that's ridiculous, you should see my DVD purchasing rules.) So, according to my Netflix queue, I'll soon be watching The Grudge with an unconscious girl in the room. That's the American remake, mind you. I should make her pay extra.

---

UPDATE!

---

I forgot one.
7. In the end, the fish played by Will Smith introduces fishes played by Missy Elliot and Christian Aguilera. Since warbling disco hits in abysmal movies is apparently her thing, Christina sings "Car Wash," which Missy declares "a Shark Tale exclusive," as if that somehow makes it more valuable. Bad Boys II Soundtrack. Word.

Ah, this brings back memories. I never actually saw the film, but I saw the trailer over and over again for some reason.

"I'm gonna kick...your..." (EXPLODE!!!)

It would have been worth the ticket price just to find out what that guy was going to kick.

You need to see this hilarious trailer for the upcoming Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.

As one of the books that defined little Jamie's childhood, I'm very excited about all this. And, also, they appear to have a lock on the award for Most Genius Casting Move Ever: Alan Rickman as Marvin the Paranoid Android.

I want furdell.com to be your exclusive home for photos of Tim Robbins surreptitiously flipping Chris Rock the bird during the Oscar ceremony.

Mission accomplished.

Discuss.

The "campusmoviefest" show was last night. We were told they would be showing the 10 best films. They did. As expected, we saw ten horrible, horrible student films, complete with stupid-looking effects, inaudible dialogue, bad lighting and framing, and not a plot among them. Oh -- and none of them was ours.

Oh, but wait! The show's not over. There are four more, award-winning films left. (I assumed as much; there's no way they'd show all that crap and not show our film.)

Then they showed four more films. None of which were ours.

So there you have it: Fruitless is worse than fourteen terrible, terrible movies. Deeply depressing.

Positive spin: We knew the judging criteria, and deliberately ignored it. In our defense, we had been told the wrong theme (a theme to which most of the movies shown tried desperately to pander); not in our defense, we never even planned to incorporate the theme we thought it was going to be. Another criteria is how well effects are used, and since effects are stupid-looking, we didn't.

Negative spin: Fourteen? Fourteen? I just applied to a bunch of film schools. What the hell was I thinking? I have no future.

We are so going to lose tomorrow.

(For those of you who don't remember, I'm talking about how our movie is going to lose campusmoviefest.)

There are two major reasons why we are doomed. In reverse order:

2. We didn't use any stupid effects.

One of the judging criteria is actually how well you use iMovie's special effects features, which are, by the way, awful. Last year's winner from Emory was a "parody" of The Ring (in quotes because it wasn't at all "funny") that extensively used iMovie's revolutionary ability to speed up motion. Second place was a movie so boring that I only saw the first 45 seconds, but in that amount of time they managed to work in sepia tone.

And our movie? Well, we played around with lighting a little, but nothing anyone would notice. (There is that school of thought that editing shouldn't draw attention to itself.) In other words, as people who have made movies before, we edited it well instead of using all of iMovie's bells and whistles, and for that we will surely suffer.

1. Corporate sponsorship.

Each year, this contest has a new "theme." Submitted films are asked to conform to the theme, no matter how loosely. Our team, hilariously, was told the wrong theme. Even when we found out the right one, though, we had no idea how to work it in. The theme is "Good comes around." We had already decided on the cat thing, in which there is no good, either coming or going. We decided to ignore the theme.

Come to find out that Delta, the festival's major sponsor, has a new slogan, "Good goes around," which, well, I have no idea what it means. But that's beyond the point -- this can't possibly be a coincidence. In other words, we should have done a movie about the convenience and affordability of air travel -- or at least something that a company can use to show off what great things it's funding. Robert, you were right about one thing: my Hitler & Stalin! idea would not have worked out. But the cat idea is definitely no better.

In short, tomorrow's winner will:
* be effects-heavy, with sped-up motion, over-use of the "gong" sound effect, and star wipe.
* be entirely toothless.
* suck.
* not be our movie.

RM has fixed his broken-ass website. You can now watch our movie.

See how the passage of time is marked by me needing a shave? Movie magic.

As James has hinted, I haven't been a good blogger lately because I've been focusing on movie-making. I recently made the rotten mistake of applying to film schools, which involves a lot of waiting around and nail-biting, so actually making a movie was good both for distracting me, and for bolstering my chances when I have to reapply next year because nobody wants me.

OK, so the first Cannonball Run wasn't so great. But man, did they improve on it 1,000-fold with the sequel.

Ahh, are you surprised? That's right: in fact, CRII may be the definitive movie of the 1980s. It's attained the vaunted "Keep until I delete" status on my TiVo. Here, I'll watch it, and tell you what I'm thinking as it happens, IN REAL TIME. The Internet has never been more useful.

Thanks to TiVo and Kimberly's wishlistery, we've been TiVoing (note illegal verbal usage) Gary Oldman movies. Humorously, that includes Luc Besson's abysmal sci-fi epic, The Fifth Element.

Seriously, I think this must have been one of those situations where Besson needed to make a flop, like those guys in The Producers. There's no way a movie could have intentionally been made this badly. It's got some of the worst acting performances in movie history, including the honorable Mr. Oldman as an intergalactic weapons dealer with an inexplicable and atrocious Southern accent. And the less said about the roles played by Luke Perry, Chris Tucker and WWF's Zeus, the better.

But the funniest part of this movie, and I'm sure Andrew will remember this, wasn't even in the movie. It was the promotional teaser material that proclaimed:

Yes, it mu5t be found. Long before "leetspeak" annoyed the world, Luc Besson confused us by replacing the letter "s" in the word "must" with the number 5. The first time I saw this poster, I read it as "It muft be found," since "five" starts with "f". But then, much as I now pronounce The 2wenty as "The Twooo-wenty," in order to mock this poster as strongly as possible, I started pronouncing it just like it's spelled: "mu-five-tee."

Then, to make things more ridiculous, in certain conversations with Andrew, I started randomly pronouncing the word "must" as "mu-five-tee." For example, "I absolutely mu-five-tee not see this movie." Good times.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I mufivetee continue this bad-movie festival by un-pausing Cannonball Run II, which Tivo was kind enough to Tivoly Tivo for me in a Tivoesque fashion. Hmm, It appears that Tony Danza is having an argument with a chimpanzee. I should have expected that.

With my eleven free movie passes, the theatre was my oyster. I could see any movie I wanted. There was just one problem: all movies suck. Well, that's not really the problem. It did trouble me that, of the two movies I was vaguely interested in, one was a sequel to a remake, and the other was the second sequel to an adaptation of a very lame comic book.

In the end, I opted to see the one that nobody else would see with me -- Blade: Trinity. Why it has "Trinity" in the title, I do not know. Assessment: Pretty good. I had very low expectations for Blade, being as it was based on a truly godawful comic book character with no popularity to speak of, but that movie turned out to be awesome. I then had raised exectations for Blade II, which was completely awful. So, my expectations were once again way, way low for the latest installment, which perhaps led to my liking it.

Unfortunately, you didn't see it with me. However, using technology and science, you can see it with me! Just print out the following handy guide to Things I Would Have Said in a Loud Voice During the Film, and read it to yourself during key scenes. It'll be like having me right there with you. Awesome!

Yesterday I attended a free sneak preview showing of Jude Law's A Series of Old Jim Carrey Acts Brought to You By AFLAC. (IMDB is not whistling Dixie when it lists, among the cast, Gilbert Gottfried as the AFLAC duck.)

This movie's got something for everyone. Small children will enjoy the Home Alone-esque antics of Sunny, the baby who bites things a lot and communicates via subtitles; old men will enjoy lusting after a 16-year-old girl:

Actually, the movie had a healthy dose of darkness and was certainly salvageable. Unfortunately -- hmm -- right before Jim Carrey was about to do away with Meryl Streep (WARNING: That was a spoiler! HAHAHAHA), the theatre experienced some technical difficulties, and the film stopped. I spent the next half hour or so egging on a bunch of unruly kids, which was great fun. It occured to me that, with an army of small children, I would be unstoppable. Who's gonna shoot little kids? Even with riot gear? I mean, come on.

Julia, my mysterious girlfriend who I usually avoid blogging about (hi Jules!), went to check on the other theatre, which was working fine. Should have gone with theatre "5" instead of "4." (Note: in the beginning of the movie, Jude Law tells us that we could see a much more pleasant and nicey-nice movie in theatre 2; little did he know that's where they were playing Blade: Trinity.) On the way back, an usher had given Julia two free tickets to compensate for our sad, wasted experience.

This came as a surprise to me, since we had gotten in free in the first place. But I'm not one to look a coveted AMC Readmittance Pass in the mouth. So, on the way out, I made sure to get two free tickets as well, from a different usher. Then Julia caught up with me.

"Did you get two free tickets?" said I. "Oh, wait a sec." She ran back in and got two more passes, bringing our total up to six. We felt very naughty.

Walking down the hall to the exit, we contemplated hopping to Ocean's 12 on a nearby screen, but decided against it. Obviously, God smiled upon our good deed (or more accurately, lack of bad deed just then), because there was yet another woman giving out free passes to irked parents on the way out. I stood in line, ready to get another two passes.

"How many in your party?" "Two," said some guy. Following the lead of those around me, I held out two fingers to speed the process along. "Three," said some old lady. "Well, there were five of us, but I'll just take three. I don't want to get greedy," said some completely stupid, even older lady. "No, no, I insist," insisted usher lady. Then she turned to me. "There were five of us." The guy next to me chuckled. If the usher suspected anything, she was too busy to care; she didn't even separate the last five passes of the book, she gave me the whole thing.

So, there you have it: while the movie isn't great, seeing it could lead to massive profits. I recommend!

My thanks to Jeremy for identifying Zoolander and Eight Crazy Nights as Robot Dance movies. (That's movies that use the robot breakdancing technique as shorthand for "this character is a retard," or sometimes "hey! look! it's the robot dance -- that's funny, right? laugh oh god please laugh or I'll never work in Hollywood again.")

For a brief, shining moment, both the Robot Dance and Smashmouth lists stood tall with 10 movies each -- until I discovered two more Smashmouth movies. (That's movies whose soundtracks feature the bland, overplayed pop that only Smashmouth can provide.) But still, 10 robot movies ought to be enough for us to all finally admit that the joke is over. It just...isn't...funny.

Hmm, I guess I didn't notice the Smashmouth song in The Sweetest Thing because I was busy wretching. Just thinking about that movie makes me a little ill. Actually I'm kind of surprised there wasn't robot dancing in that one.

Luckily, the Onion AV club watched America's Heart & Soul so I didn't have to.

Hey now! I'm an all-star! Get my game on! So catchy and inoffensive!!! Let's put it in all our movies!!!! Hooray for Smashmouth!!!!!

Somewhere in Chile...

U.S. officials said Chilean police had been chafing for a week about a demand by Secret Service agents that they control the president's space, even when he was on sovereign turf. Now, it was payback time.

In the fracas that ensued, amid a flurry of half nelsons, one Secret Service agent wound up jammed against a wall. "You're not stopping me! You're not stopping me! I'm with the president!" an unidentified agent can be heard yelling on videotape of the mayhem.

...

Then Bush either realized he was missing something, or he heard the commotion. The president, who is rarely alone, even in his own house, turned and walked back to the front door unaccompanied, facing the backs of a sea of dark suits. Bush, with his right hand, reached over the suits and pointed insistently at Trotta. At first the officials, with their backs to him and their heads in the rumble, did not realize it was the president intervening. Bush then braced himself against someone and lunged to retrieve the agent, who was still arguing with the Chileans. The shocked Chilean officials then released Trotta.

Trotta walked in behind Bush, who looked enormously pleased with himself. He was wearing the expression that some critics call a smirk, and his eyebrows shot up as if to wink at bystanders.

Bush adjusted his right cufflink and muttered something to Lagos, took the first lady's arm and headed into the dinner of grilled fish.

As you may or may not know, I am a Bad Movie Afficianado. I'm always on the lookout for the next Cool As Ice or Disco Godfather.

The best bad movies are bad from start to finish without letting up; they're fun to harmlessly mock; they serve as a reminder that, no matter how badly you mess something up, you're still not in any way responsible for producing From Justin to Kelly.

It seems to happen every so often; a studio spends a lot making a big movie, hoping it will be the next blockbuster, and for whatever reason, it just doesn't work. At all. And it's obvious, and there's no way to hide it. The more advertising and exposure the movie gets, the worse people think of it. Then the buzz just gets worse and worse, until finally the movie comes out, and nobody goes to see it.

Except me.

So far this decade (what IS this decade called, anyway?) we've had some great high profile stinkers: Glitter, Rollerball and Gigli probably being the most prominent.

And in the Realm of Bad Movies, of which I am King, there's... well, there's a lot of buzz around Son of the Mask. So far, based on the teaser and the trailer, it looks like the worst thing ever conceived by man.

If you saw Lord of the Rings III: Wrath of the Nerds in a theater, you may recall having seen the teaser before dozing off for three hours. It inexplicably features a poorly rendered computer generated baby, unconvincingly jumping up and dancing around. I seriously thought I was watching a preview for Ally McBeal Finally Goes Completely Fucking Crazy. Especially since nothing on the screen bore any resemblance to the likable original film.

In fact, neither of the then-up-and-coming players from that film (Jim Carrey, Cameron Diaz) are back for this sequel. If you're casting director, you clearly need a big name to replace Carrey. So they got Jamie Kennedy.

Yes, Jamie Kennedy, the star of... um... yeah. He was the geeky kid in Scream and had his own show on UPN for a while. Inexplicably, Malibu's Most Wanted didn't kill him off.

OK, fine, they're trying the up-and-comer route again (albeit with a talentless boob). But in the trailer, most of the focus seems to be on cartoon mischief between the poorly rendered inexplicably super-powered baby and a poorly rendered mask-wearing dog.

Seriously. What's up with the baby? Are there people out there who actually find these scenes funny?

"Oh-hoo, look Mabel! The baby's kicking that guy! That's adorable!"

"Aww, what's it doin' now... OHH, it's feet are runnin' without the rest of it!"

What a hoot.

Meanwhile, the otherwise likable Alan Cumming (Wyatt in Josie and the Pussycats and Nightcrawler in X2) looks uncomfortable as Loki, whom we all know from Thor comics as the Norse god of mischief.

Unfortunately, this movie may unleash ragnarok on his career.

So, all of this is funny and cringe-inducing enough. But then I read an interview with one of the movie's co-stars, Kal Penn (you may recall that he went to White Castle) that really... really... disturbed me. Seriously... this may keep me up at night.

?That?s a very over the top script,? Penn said. ?It was actually kind of fun to work on. It?s $100 million budget. I don't know how you spend $100 million, but I saw how you come close. It?s live action with a lot of animation and special effects in it. So every character is not one dimensional, but exaggerated. Jamie Kennedy plays The Mask and there are two or three guys that work at this animation studio with him, so I play this guy who is like an animator, special effects technician.?

Whoa, whoa whoa WHOA!

Whoa!

Back the truck up, Kumar!

One hundred million dollars?!?

That's what it cost to make this piece of crap?

Oy. Perhaps that money could have gone to better use... say, ending world hunger or something.

If that figure's accurate, and this movie flops as expected, then we're talking a monetary loss on the order of Andrew's favorite movie, The Adventures of Pluto Nash. That opus was made in 2000 at a cost of $100 million; it was released two years later and grossed just $4.4 million at the box office.

And yet, Son of the Mask could make that look like an unmitigated success.

Can't wait to see it!

A while back, when I was writing about Action Jackson, I promised I would write about the Most Mediocre Movie Ever. And here it is...

It's Leviathan.

Leviathan.

Thank you.

[...]

I liked this entry in an online Photoshop contest... what WarGames might have been like if they'd had Google.

A hell of a lot easier than dialing every possible phone number in the city with a 300 baud modem.

(I? Am a colossal geek.)

Why oh why will nobody bid on the Rocky DVD set that I shouldn't have purchased? Do they know my horrible secret? Savvy bastards!

Recent epiphany: I am no longer a comic book collector. I mean, I still have thousands of comic books meticulously stored and ordered. But I don't think about it nearly as much as my rapidly-growing DVD collection, which is much less shame-inducing. If comics were still exactly like they were in the mid-to-late '80s, I think I'd still be all about them. Or maybe if they went back to calling Captain America a commie smasher.

They built a Wal-Mart on top of an ancient Hawaiian gravesite. And they moved the headstones... but they DIDN'T MOVE THE BODIES!

It's high time the intelligence community came clean and told us exactly what was the last film John F. Kennedy saw before his assassination.

According to many sources, including its own DVD packaging, that honor belongs to Tom Jones, starring Albert Finney as the title sex bomb. The movie was so popular that they later added an exclamation point to the end and made it a musical television series, this time starring Tom Jones as himself.

However, certain fringe groups claim that Kennedy watched From Russia With Love, the second James Bond film, a full three days later. The James Bond novels had gained a great deal of popularity several years before when Kennedy listed From Russia With Love as one of his top ten favorite books. Coincidence? No!

Bonus: Can you name more movies that claim to be JFK's last? If so...do it.

During a recent viewing of The Punisher, I kept thinking about the reviews, which were almost universally negative. I can't figure this out at all. It's a really solid action movie, with pornographic levels of violence. Arrows get shot through necks! Knives get jabbed into people! Hot water is thrown in faces! And guns, guns, GUNS!!!

It even has great action movie dialogue:

If The Punisher isn't awesome, then no action movie possibly can be -- and we know that's not the case. So why do so many people pretend to not like this movie?

Is it because comic book movies are judged on a different scale from movies with other source material? Why do the effects-laden Lord of the Rings movies deserve multiple Oscars, while the in-my-opinion-better Spider-Man films don't get so much as a nomination? Why is Daredevil -- an entirely passable movie with some good villain performances -- given worse reviews than the unwatchable Resident Evil: Apocalypse?

Tom Leykis, a talk radio host, was beaten up in Seattle, apparently by a caller he had insulted on the air.

This immediately made me think of the Oliver Stone-directed movie Talk Radio, in which Eric Bogosian plays a shock jock who is assaulted by a listener. Turns out that, for the role, Bogosian studied and mimicked the on-air production style, speech patterns and mannerisms of... Tom Leykis.

Circle of life.

Screw world peace. If I had one wish, it would be that the movie Thunderpants (starring Rupert Grint, a.k.a. Ron Weasley) would be released on DVD in the U.S. Here's the plot outline for the movie, as listed on IMDB.

An 11-year-old boy's amazing ability to break wind leads him first to fame and then to death row, before it helps him to fulfill his ambition of becoming an astronaut.

It might be worth another trip to the UK just to see this film.

I, occasionally, go to the movies.

[Pause, wait for gasps to die down.]

Yes, it's true. There are three theaters I frequent the most: Landmark's E Street Cinema in D.C., which I suppose broke off from the Bruce Springsteen Multiplex; AMC's Courthouse Plaza in Arlington, starring their kick-ass mascot Filmguy (who apparently also goes by the aliases Flick, Clip and "Clippy"); and Regal Cinema's Ballston Mall multiplex.

The latter is a dump. Ballston gets most of the bigger blockbuster movies, rather than the superior Courthouse Plaza, so we often wind up driving there against our will. It pretty much encompasses everything bad about going to the movies; sticky floors, no student discounts, and broke-ass, circa-1995 arcade games in the lobby (e.g. Marvel Super Heroes, but not all the buttons work... that should be a capital offense).

But the final insult was hurled about a year ago when Regal Cinemas unveiled its brand-new, exciting pre-show entertainment:

THE 2WENTY.

Yes, it's spelled "2wenty," presumably in an effort to be rad to the max, d00d. Thus, I pronounce it "The Twooo-wenty."

So what is THE 2WENTY? In one phrase, the best way to describe would be to say, "It's a twooowenty-minute commercial." But that, in itself, does not convey the utter evil of the operation; after all, advertisements before movies have become commonplace, and yet until now haven't instilled in me the URGE TO HUNT DOWN AND KILL EVERYONE RESPONSIBLE, AND THEIR FAMILIES.

If Regal wants to set up its crappy-ass Christie digital projectors and show me amateurish advermentaries about the making of some shitty new mini-series on TNT that I won't want to miss, starring, I don't know, Wendie Jo Sperber as an intrepid biological terrorism expert, and Treat Williams as, uh, himself, I guess, then fine. Making me watch three of these promotional features crosses the line a little bit, but at least I can ignore without feeling I've been somehow personally insulted.

But what's reprehensible about THE 2WENTY is the way it's presented: as an entertainment program that I should WANT to see. When it starts up, you get a title card, and an announcer saying, "Welcome to THE 2WENTY!" (He doesn't pronounce it right.)

"Here are the advertisements you'll have to sit through:

[advertisement 1]
[advertisement 2]
[advertisement 3]"

Then they'll start them up. Each one lasts five or six minutes. Generally, they'll include fakish "making of" a series on TNT, or interviews of stars of the latest NBC sitcom debacle, or maybe canned interviews with stars appearing in upcoming movies or DVDs.

After they finish one of these programs, THEY BREAK FOR A FUCKING COMMERCIAL. God, I wish I was kidding. What the fuck?!? Are they actually trying to pretend that, in order to afford showing us 20 minutes of advertising, THEY HAD TO SELL EXTRA ADVERTISING IN BETWEEN?

Worst of all comes at the end of the programming, but before they've finished showing us advertisements that break up the programming (they're not quite ready to show us any actual movies yet). The cheesy announcer tells us:

"You've just seen THE 2WENTY! If you missed part of THE 2WENTY, come early to the theater next time to catch all of it."

"THE 2WENTY is entertainment ignited."

THERE! Right there. Did you catch that last bit? The 2wenty is ENTERTAINMENT IGNITED. They present this 20-minute advertising... thing, which is broken up by futher advertising, as if it itself were somehow entertaining, and not a complete waste of time and money seemingly designed solely to incur my wrath.

The concept they're pushing, of the advertising program that they try to make me think is worth my time, is reinforced by the existence of The Official THE 2WENTY Website, where you can learn all about the exiting advertising programs they have in store for you next time you decide you really, really want to go out to the theater specifically to see THE 2WENTY. Fuck, I may just buy a ticket and walk out after THE 2WENTY ends. Bitch.

And yet, Regal Entertainment continues to try to delude us into thinking this is what people want to see:

The 2wenty is a larger-than-life pre-show adding unique and special entertainment to the REG movie-going experience
The 2wenty is quality entertainment supplied by our four content partners:
[some kickass corporations]

We are digitizing 4,801 screens in 437 theatres (top 69 markets), to be completed by February 2004. By creating the ONLY national Digital Content Network, Regal CineMedia is revolutionizing in-cinema advertising through:
? Production Savings ? No cost for transfer to film in top 69 digital markets
? Flexibility ? Can add tags, split creative by rating, schedule multiple spots in one flight
? Enhanced Proof of Performance ? Will be able to monitor advertising in flight and adjust accordingly

Bleh. This re-defines the phrase "ad creep."

Meanwhile, all this might be forgivable if it resulted in, say, lower ticket prices, lower concession stand prices, non-sticky floors, a Marvel Super Heroes game that's fully-functional, etc. But instead, it's clearly pure gravy for Regal, which probably doesn't make a lot of money off ticket prices, but can make a bundle by force-feeding its customers this tripe and calling it "entertainment."

So, in conclusion: I'm calling out the people responsible for this atrocity!

YOU WILL BOW DOWN BEFORE ME, THE 2WENTY! You, and then, one day after that, a little later on... YOUR HEIRS!!!!

I'm James Furdell, and I approved this message of unbridled anger.

My latest blog project has been to seek out the Most Mediocre Movie ever.

It's not an easy task; while it's easy to decide that a movie that really bad or really good, it's hard to find one with an equal balance of cool and suck. Thus, I needed some guidelines at the start to help me narrow the field.

First, I decided to use my good friend, the Internet Movie Database. Its user rating system features a comprehensive 1-10 scale, and the bigger films will get thousands of votes, creating a good representative sample. Thus, to consider a movie to be completely mediocre, it had to receive a 5.0 rating from IMdB.

However, that left me with a lot of entries. To whittle it down further, I restricted my search to that mediocrest of decades, the 1980s, and required a minimum of 100 votes.

Originally, one title that caught my eye was 1988's Action Jackson.
This perhaps-too-late-in-the-decade flick tried to make an "action" "star" out of old reliable Carl Weathers, a.k.a. Apollo Smile in the Rocky movies.

I'm a bigger fan of Carl these days, after his self-deprecating turns as himself on both Arrested Development and on Saturday Night Live, where he starred in a commercial asking voters to make him the third actor from Predator, after Schwarzenegger and Ventura, to be voted in as governor. ("Vote for Carl Weathers... I was the black guy in Predator.")

Apparently, back in 1988 they decided to test the action movie waters by making Carl the star. Unfortunately, Carl just looks kind of goofy trying to strut around like a tough guy. Even trying to deliver Schwarzenegger-like funny lines doesn't really work out; in one scene, a taxi tries to run him over, and Carl runs after it after saying, "I have to catch a cab!" Which he does.

After Jackson is thrown from the cab comes this immortal scene:

- Jackson faces down cab and yells at driver.
- Cab comes hurtling toward Jackson.
- Jackson jumps onto cab hood, springs up over the cab and does a backflip, flies through the air, and safely lands on his feet.
- Cab driver is so distraught/distracted by this physically miraculous turn of events that he neglects to notice he is still driving very fast, and plows straight into a furniture store.

I hear that scene was ad-libbed.

Anyway, the ups-and-downs of this movie's quality did have me considering it for the Mediocrity award. After all:

The supporting cast is amazing. The guy who went berserk in Predator plays Jackson's boss. Biff from Back to the Future plays a goof-off cop. Also appearing: multiple other tertiary characters from Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Commando, etc. It's a veritable 1980s Action Movie Edition of "Hey, It's That Guy!" UPGRADE.

But for the big, sleazy bad guy, they chose... Craig T. Nelson. Yes, TV's Coach. DOWNGRADE.

Love interest #1 is a young-ish, totally hot Sharon Stone! With improbably high '80s hair! And she gets naked in a gratuitous shower scene! UPGRADE!

But love interest #2 is Vanity.

No, I mean Vanity, female pop vocalist, once part of Prince's musical second string, as well as his love interest and pet project. For some reason, the movie's casting director thought she would be perfect playing drugged out, vapid singer who whores herself out for heroin. (By the way, be sure to check out this awesome Vanity fan page.)

Comically, as a side note, the heroin provided to Vanity by her man Craig Tizzy comes in a pristine-looking metallic syringe, which I imagined to be a measles-mumps-rubella innoculation. "Ooooh, that's good MMR baby!" "I've gotta have another hit of booster! YOU GOTTA GET ME MORE BOOSTER, BABY!"

Hm. At any rate, DOWNGRADE.

A-ha, you say... but Vanity, like Stone, also gets topless! Strangely enough, PUSH. She's just too repulsive. Plus, now she's fashioned herself into a born-again evangelist. So, extra creepy.

The soundtrack features music by '80s stars The Pointer Sisters and Herbie Hancock! UPGRA...

Ahh, not so fast, me. This movie came out in 1988, a good three years after anybody stopped caring about either of those musical acts. The Pointers' "He Turned Me Out," played over the opening credits, is especially dull. DOWNGRADE.

By the way, are "action" and "Jackson" supposed to rhyme? I don't think so, my friend. Chalk up another victory for our old nemesis slant rhyme. DOWNGRADE.

So anyway, Action Jackson just isn't good enough to be considered mediocre, and anyway, in the past few months its IMdB rating has slipped to 4.4 out of 10. Back to the drawing board, it would seem, in search of mediocrity.

Ahh, but I already know what I'm going to pick! More on that film at a later date. In the meantime, since action movies are always funnier in French, here's a picture of the French video box for Action Jackson. Parce q'avec Jackson, l'action est garantie!

CMT, or Country Music Television, was showing the Hall Needham classic Stroker Ace this weekend. The film, of course, stars Burt Reynolds as a NASCAR driver, alongside Jim Nabors, better known as TV's Gomer Pyle, as his crew chief.

While I didn't stay tuned for all of this cinema classic, I did manage to catch this classic exchange. After Burt has finished second in a NASCAR race, a member of his pit crew speaks up:

PIT CREW GUY: What's wrong with second place?
BURT AND GOMER: Screw second!
[Cut to reaction shot of Pit Crew Guy]
KETTLE DRUM SOUND FX: BoiiiiiIIIINGGG!

Kettle drum sound effect?! What are you doing here?

That's right, it's all fun and games until someone brings kettle drum sound effects to the party. It's the wacky auditory cue that lets you know this is a goofy comedy, and they're just clownin' around! Ha-yuck!

By the way, I have it on good authority that Nabors also appeared in Needham's Cannonball Run II as "Pvt. Homer Lyle." Hmmmm. Perhaps he's hanging out with Roger Mo... I mean, "Seymour Goldfarb." What are you trying to hide, Hal Needham? I have only one thing to say to you...

J'ACCUSE!

David Schmader, who provides the audio commentary for the "VIP edition" on DVD (out Tuesday), has seen Showgirls over 100 times.

I, unbelievably, still haven't seen it once.

We're not the only ones mocking McG. CNN is on board, as you can see in its review of Catwoman:

Doing the right thing and exposing her former company for its evil deeds requires protracted cat fights -- literally -- with Laurel. The director, who goes by Pitof -- presumably to avoid being confused with "Charlie's Angels" director McG -- tries to infuse these brawls with a forced sense of Sapphic tension.

What a disappointment. Halle Berry starring in a Catwoman movie could have sprung out of the James Furdell Fantasy Movie Generator Device (patent pending). But it's quite obviously a piece of shit, thanks to our favorite new auteur, "Pitof."

Do not question the blinding talent of Pitof! Now go fetch Pitof some espresso!

If you can navigate the most god-awful site design on the web, you can view the trailer for the upcoming Fatty McFatFat: 2 Tonnes of Funny. Should be hilarious fun for the whole family.

Another hilarious idea I came up with: There should be a show in Vegas called "Just Siegfried!" For the first half-hour, Siegfried would do card tricks or something. Then he'd start crying a whole lot. Hey, it's better than Celine.

A lot of movies are bad. This we know. But there are only a few that I out-and-out despise. Here...are their stories.

Two days before Brando died, the New York Post ran this article about how he was broke and hiding his Oscars from bill collectors. I like to think that if I received $3.7 million for two weeks work, I could stretch it out at least until two days before I'm dead.

That's right, I'm picking on a dead guy.

That new Spider-Man 2 movie sure has some nice computer-generated special effects. Much improved over the first one. Check it out:

It's so real!

And it's not going to work for this guy:

A drunken man being forced to the ground after crashing his car and punching a cop in the head Thursday pleaded for leniency by claiming to be a Catholic priest, authorities said.

Those of you who know my brother are aware that he is retarded. However, it has come to my attention that total strangers read this site and might assume, from my retarded brother's uncanny grasp of the English language, that he has insights. To those people I present the following rebuttal.

Cannonball Run has been a proud member of my extensive-yet-exclusive DVD collection for quite some time now, and I have viewed the film enough times to make me an expert.

Now, first of all I think it's important to point out that Cannonball Run is based on true, awesome events. There actually was such a thing as the Cannonball Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, organized by CB screenwriter Brock Yates. Bet you didn't know that, huh, Mr. Smart-Ass? Hmm? Didn't think so. In fact, Yates himself was on the team that dressed up a car like an ambulance, complete with a fake doctor and his wife acting as the patient (though in real life their car broke down before they reached the finish). The point of the Dash, if there can be said to have been a point, was that speed limits are not necessary as long as people are good drivers...or something. The point may also have been "hilarity."

Let us shred my brother's argument on a point by point basis.

First of all, Dom DeLuise's turn as Captain Chaos is the funniest part of this, or in fact any movie. Gentle reader, words can not convey the sheer hilariosity when DeLuise makes the inexplicably fast transformation into his costumed alter ego, whom Burt Reynolds apparently loathes. The look on Burt?s face when Captain Chaos shows up?look, I?ve seen this movie about forty times, and I still laugh so hard that milk comes out of my nose, and I haven?t had milk in years. Think about that.

Roger Moore? Okay, we all know I have a weakness for anything remotely related to James Bond. My previously mentioned DVD-collection would carry a lot more clout if it didn?t include such classics as Casino Royale and Moonraker. But I believe I can say, with total objective certainty, that Roger Moore is fantastic in this film. In one of my favorite scenes, when Moore?s concerned mother finds his gun, he regretfully must kill her. Well, it?s funnier when Roger Moore says it. Moving right along?

Yes, Farrah Fawcett is awful. In fact I?d say she?s the worst thing about this movie. But if the worst thing about a movie is a woman with a nice pair of floppy titties, then it must be the Fucking Awesomest Movie of All Time.

Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.?s drunken shenanigans are actually quite funny when you view them the way myself and Celebrity Movie-Watching Pal Matt B. did. (Hi Matt!) James, we suggest you watch the movie again, and this time keep this thought in mind: ?Hey, is this actually in the script, or did Dean Martin really just show up hammered every day?? Comedy.

Terry Bradshaw? Yeah, okay. Well, somehow he was more convincing in this role than he was playing himself in Smokey and the Bandit II. You gotta give him that.

I?m going to skip some of your other good points and skip straight to what must be the Stupidest Thing My Brother Has Ever Typed, and that is that the end of this movie is in some way not spectacular. Yes, James?s description of the ending was accurate, but he likes all sorts of movies that don?t have resolutions. Remember how much you loved Blow Up? Yes, I did go there. I just compared Cannonball Run to an Antonioni film. Deal with it!

This movie is madcap and wacky, and its ending suits it! But the outtake version of the ending, which plays at the end of the credits, has to be the funniest thing ever committed to celluloid. It?s similar to the actual ending, but it goes like this:

Again, this is something you must see for yourself, probably while finishing a bottle of something.

In conclusion, my brother is completely wrong and stupid. But don?t take my word for it; rush out and rent or buy several copies of Cannonball Run immediately. Because that way, even if you don?t like the movie, I win.

Do I hate myself?

You could make an argument for yes, since I occasionally watch some of the worst movies ever made. I could win a Nobel prize with the potential material I could write about gems such as Cool As Ice and Disco Godfather, and, um... Cool As Ice 2: Cooler Than Ice.

But there are still many bad movies out there I haven't seen, which is why I recently sat down for a viewing of the DVD of Hal Needham's 1981 classic The Cannonball Run.

Needham's movies seem to have their own oeuvre. Or niche. Whatever. Needham actually got his start as Burt Reynolds' stunt double on Gunsmoke in the '60s, but was suddenly thrust into unlikely directoral stardom with 1977's Smokey and the Bandit, a giddy chase movie with likeable performances by everyone and a great country soundtrack by Jerry Reed.

Needham brings a silly but energized sensibility to the production and an action man's need to see things moving. But he also has a distinctive feeling for relationships, and he's good with a joke. Put all that together, and Smokey is, at the very least (and unlike its sequels), a simple and original pleasure.

--Tom Keogh, super70s.com

Needham's debut was a huge hit, finishing second at the box office for the year to Star Wars. Studio bosses had a resounding answer to the oft-asked question, "Will it play in Peoria?" and were eager for more films from Needham partnered with Reynolds.

Sadly, that's when the two started to kind of phone things in. However, Hooper, featuring Reynolds as a stuntman, and Smokey and the Bandit II, a lackluster sequel that sadly gave us the first screen comedy partnership between Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, and a pregnant elephant, apparently did well enough for somebody to green-light Cannonball.

And what a star-studded affair it would be. Even today the cast list is amazing. Besides the questionable comedy team of Reynolds and DeLuise, you had:

Roger Moore
Farrah Fawcett
Farrah Fawcett's nipples
Dean Martin
Sammy Davis Jr.
Jack Elam
Terry Bradshaw
Jackie Chan
Peter Fonda
Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder
Bert Convy
Jamie Farr

OK, granted, it's starting to look like the guest stars list for an episode of The Love Boat or Match Game '78 towards the end there, but that's still an impressive list, especially if you add the (by now inexplicable) box-office draw of Reynolds.

With that kind of star power, and with Needham directing, you might be able to forgive people for thinking that maybe Cannonball would be able to recapture the all-out action and light-hearted charm of the original Bandit. Or perhaps they were sucked in by the classic Drew Struzan poster artwork:

How thrilled and/or terrified they must have been, to sit in that dark theater in 1981 and hear the opening tones of the opening theme song, a bizarre mix of country, disco and synthesizer, and sung by Ray Stevens, the musical auteur who blessed us with such novelty hits as "Ahab the Arab" and "The Streak."

Following that, we learn that we're here to witness a cross-country race where the only rule is... wait for it... waaaaait for it... you guessed it, there are no rules. Then, we take an eternity of screen time to meet our contestants.

Burt Reynolds is a mechanic with the somewhat politically incorrect idea of racing in an ambulance, thus avoiding being pulled over. He also likes to, inexplicably, fly his airplane onto the main street of a small town in order to pick up some product-placed Budweiser. Power lines be damned!

Reynolds' favorite hobby is smacking around Dom DeLuise, his mentally disturbed sidekick who, in times of trouble, manifests a second personality known as "Captain Chaos," a superhero in a cape and mask who throws his oppressors through flimsy plate-glass windows. Oh, how I wish I was kidding.

Roger Moore shows up in surely his most bizarre role ever. He plays a man who is deluded into thinking he's... Roger Moore. But his name is really... Seymour Goldfarb? WTF?! Honestly, my brain imploded halfway through the scene in which Seymour explains to his mother why he pretends to be Roger Moore, so I really can't give you the full story. Every scene involving Moore includes a sound-alike James Bond-ish theme, and a quasi-"Bond girl" voiced by Rocky the Squirrel, and Moore activating some kind of spy-device on his car. Apparently the Goldfarb story element was designed to prevent Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, the Bond movie patriarch, from suing. (A lesser man would here include a joke about steamed Broccoli. Make up your own.)

Farrah Fawcett is thrown in sort of as an afterthought, playing a dippy environmental activist (ha ha, isn't the environment stupid?) who's easily tricked into aiding Burt and Dom's cause. The scene where she tries to hold a flirty conversation with Burt, while a sappy "love theme" plays in the background, will make you want to vomit up your internal organs. At least she had the decency to not wear a bra.

Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. make an appearance, and it's the kind of appearance that makes you wonder why they were ever famous in the first place. It's not evident here, as their perpetually drunk (and driving) characters dress up as Catholic priests in an attempt to evade arrest. They later lament not dressing up as Presbyterians so they could hit on women. Don't worry guys, you can always pick up some altar boys along the way.

Terry Bradshaw. The former Steelers quarterback and current Most Annoying Man on Television was apparently a favorite of Needham. He really had to stretch his acting ability here in order to play a big, dumb guy.

Chinese martial arts star Jackie Chan made his American film debut in Cannonball alongside Chinese comedy star Michael Hui. Sadly, they're playing Japanese characters here. More sadly, the intended audience probably doesn't know the difference. At least Chan does get to squeeze in a fight scene towards the end.

Bert Convy shows up as the race's defending champion. His character spends the entire movie riding cross-country on a motorcycle, and stuck in a perpetual wheelie because his back-seat passenger is so fat. (The password is "pointless.")

Jamie Farr pays homage to his Lebanese heritage by portraying a super-rich sheik. Tell me if this line would make it into a movie today:

The Sheik: My driving is rivaled only by the lightning bolts from the heavens!

Sheik's Sister: So you still intend to enter the race with the infidel Americans?

The Sheik: My dear sister, the Cannonball shall fall to the forces of Islam! I swear it!

Yeah, I kinda doubt it too.

Anyway, there are some other minor annoying characters as well. Everybody races from New Jersey to California. The racers start at staggered times and use punch cards to later on determine order of finish. This is, of course, all forgotten at the end, when they're all in a rush to get to the punch card machine, and the first one who reaches it is declared the winner. Even though the first finisher's time might have been slower than someone else's time, who had started later, and never mind, I'm thinking wayyyyy too hard for this kind of movie.

The final insult: at the end, when Burt is complaining about Dom's alter ego for the millionth time, Dom says, that's OK, I always wanted to be... Captain USA! And, all of a sudden he's dressed like Captain America. And everybody laughs. Aaaaand... that's the end.

The moral of the story is, it all makes very little sense. This isn't so much a movie as a random collection of actors having a much better time goofing off than I am watching them. I can't wait for Cannonball Run II.

(Oh wait, they made that already. Never mind.)

It may be time to add a new entry to the Furdell Clich?d Book of Movie Clich?s, for Dummies: making reference to, or showing, two Starbucks Coffee shops across the street from each other.

I know of two qualifying films right off: Shrek 2 managed to shed the mantle of the original's Smashmouth clich?, but included this one. Best In Show features two characters who meet after seeing each other from their respective Starbuckses across the street from each other. (Maybe it's a good clich? to include in your movie, since both of those are quite funny. Did you notice yet how I can type the ? with an accent mark? I'm so sm?rt.)

Surely there are other examples. Meanwhile, how about some love for the original, bare-breasted Starbucks logo, from near Pike Place Market in Seattle:

Ahhh, sweet lady caffeine, personified.

This article, about how widescreen DVDs are now preferred over full screen by Blockbuster, reminds me of the halcyon days when my brother used to work there. Remember that, James? Those days sure were halcyon, huh?

Anyway, if I recall James's story correctly, it goes something...like this.

Well, I'm just relating the story as it was told to me about ten years ago. My version might not be completely accurate, but it's probably way more interesting than the way James tells it anyway.

Troy **

Tonight I saw Troy, yon blockbuster adaptation of the Iliad. I give it two (2) stars out of 20.

Ah, perhaps you're wondering exactly what scientific method I use to rate movies? The only one that makes any sense: I award one star for each actor that was formerly a Bond villain. 'Troy' gets 1 star each for Julian Glover (aka Kristatos) and Sean Bean who you remember as Alec Trevelyan.

It should be noted that, with a score of three (3) stars, Ronin is the best film of all time. Personally, I'm not a fan. But I'm not going to argue with the system.

Moore: What should I name my next movie? Ah, eureka! I'll name it as a reference to Fran?ois Truffaut's worst movie, which itself was based on Ray Bradbury's most overrated book. Brilliant!

Eisner: Great idea, Michael! Hey, here's a brainstorm -- your last movie was cheap to produce and made a huge profit. So I'll refuse to distribute this one on political grounds! It'll cost me a fortune! Oh, joy!!!

Moore: Good one, Michael! Hey, time out, another thought is coming to me! Yes, here it comes, here it comes -- I got it! I'm going to wait until the last second, so I can blow this whole thing out of proportion! OH MY GOD I'M SO SMART ARRRRGH -- * (heart attack)

Moore devotees: Oh no! Probably nobody's going to pick up distribution on a definite box office hit! We'll never get to see the movie! Oh, woe is us! REVOLUTION!!!

Bush: There goes the neighborhood! (smiles at camera and shrugs; still frame, roll credits)

This is how you write a movie review.

In this world, Dracula wears an earring and a ponytail. Remarkable! The Prince of Darkness shares his sense of style with Mexican drug lords, wedding videographers, and overzealous personal trainer Tony Little!

He's talking, of course, about Van Helsing.

When you're going up against some kind of supernatural monster, and said monster has the ability to resurrect and multiply when you kill it... you need to find some other way to deal with it than killing it. Because it's just going to come back to life and multiply, stupid.

I'm talking to you, Hellboy.

My birthday isn't until July 28th, but you should really start figuring out what you're going to get me now. At this rate, anything you buy me will pale in comparison to what DVD manufacturers are cooking up. They've decided to release everything awesome on July 27th. Isn't that sweet?

First off, the old softies decided to release the Dawn of the Dead remake, knowing full well that I am a lover of the zombie movie in all its forms.

Secondly, these beautiful bastards -- who are well aware that my favorite director is Paul Verhoeven -- decided to give a gift to both me and my birthday-sharer, Liz (me and Liz go way back). That present is the Showgirls VIP Edition. You don't know how long me and Liz have been waiting for a Showgirls release with some actual special features. It's taken great restraint on our part to not by the sucky-ass barebones edition.

And finally, as if gold and frankincense were not enough, I have been honored with the myrrh that is Sledge Hammer!, a show that James and I loved in our youth. They even removed the laugh track for the DVD release! Oh, true joy, thy name is DVD.

I'm just saying, you have a lot to live up to.

Long time Andrew-followers have already heard me complain about the proliferation of movies in which nerdy people robot-dance and movies featuring Smashmouth songs. Well, look alive, because it's time for...

The Third Thing All Filmmakers Should Avoid

Pay attention, filmmakers. If you ever find yourself making a sexy teen comedy -- and there's no shame in it, I assure you -- do not include the scene in which we learn the names of all the cliques. Just excise it from the screenplay.

Oh, you know the scene I'm talking about. Here, I'll be more specific: veteran student walks new student through outdoor common area of high school, pointing out similarly-dressed groups and explaining each group's clever name.

and you know, then there's one or two groups tacked on the end for comedic value, like...

Are you listenening, Hollywood? It's not funny anymore. We didn't like it in 10 Reasons Julia Stiles Must Die and we won't like it in Like Heathers But Less Dark.

NOTE: I have a rotten memory for these things, and it's not the kind of thing you can google -- so if anyone has in mind a movie that has this scene, please post a comment about it. Also don't forget I'm always looking to add to my Smashmouth and Robot Dance lists and I welcome your contributions.

So, I saw Gigli last night. Yeah, yeah, I know. Get off my back, okay? It was my roommate's Netflick. It was between that and The Towering Inferno, which turns out to be eight hours long.

Oh, I guess you expect me to write some kind of snarky review, huh? Well, prepare yourself for disappointment. The only thing less creative than Gigli is people who write snarky reviews of Gigli. And as a person who neither made nor criticized Gigli, I declare myself Better Than You. Live with it, LOSER.